Cons:

Neverwinter Nights 2 has always really been two products. There's the single-player adventure which most people play when they open the box, and then there's the Neverwinter tools, a very powerful collection of mod tools that dedicated world builders have used to create all sorts of great adventures to be released for free on the Internet. In both the original release and the game's first expansion pack, The Mask of the Betrayer, both sides were well-served. The same can't be said for Storm of Zehir. The latest expansion offers some pretty terrific tools that modders will be able to use to make some great new adventures, but the official adventure included in the box is pitifully generic.

The basic premise of Storm of Zehir is that the player is on a sea voyage to the perpetually paranoid island of Samarach, a place where the human population is at war with the snake-like Yuan-ti. After the ship runs aground during a powerful storm, the player's party finds a patron in a powerful local merchant with a suspiciously sibilant name who needs their help to re-establish her trading empire and -- not coincidentally -- figure out just who was behind the storm that sank their sabotaged ship. Along the way, players will have to figure out what new power is rising in the world that threatens everybody.

That premise turns out to be far, far better than the resulting storyline, mostly because the adventure is built around several of the new construction tools. The first is the new party-based adventuring system. It's a terrific convention in which the game responds not to one but to every member of an adventuring party. It's most noticeable during conversations where a party member with a high "intimidate" or "diplomacy" skill will have the option to interject some special comment into a conversation that might open up otherwise unavailable avenues. This also comes into play during the game's overland travel system, during which the player travels across a territory with a party using skills like "survival," "spot" and "listen" to find new things on the map or avoid wandering monsters.

The upside of this is that it lets the player really utilize all of a party's skills. It forces the player to really pay attention to the kinds of characters they bring into the mission and work to get a good breadth of abilities. In many ways it's a throwback to classic D&D "dungeon-crawl" adventuring where the player was tasked with merely exploring an area, killing lots of monsters and looting as much treasure as possible. The downside is that the included adventure completely fails to build any kind of compelling experience. Storm of Zehir is the worst sort of "Keep on the Borderlands" throwback filled with generic, poorly designed dungeons, haphazard monster layouts that feel more like treasure obstacles than any kind of working ecology, and the sad underutilization of the Yuan-ti -- easily one of D&D's most interesting and fun races.